About My Teaching

I work to design courses that ask students to understand rhetoric and writing not only as pervasive in their lives but also as avenues by which they can participate in cultural production. To those ends, I emphasize investigating multiple perspectives; engaging in discussion; and crafting arguments, narratives, and counter-discourses with alphabetic and digital projects.

How I Came to Teach Rhetoric and Composition

I have always been interested in how people use literacy practices like writing and speaking to accomplish their goals. And my interest remains in discovering and analyzing how citizens use rhetoric to get things done in their lives.

Current Research

My current projects include archival research on Iowa writer and activist Ruth Buxton Sayre (1896-1980), “First Lady of the Farm”; several analyses of activist YouTube videos that connect definitions of womanhood and mothering with social justice causes; and a study of classroom definitions of “student participation” that privilege oral communication over other forms of communication that argues for more substantially connecting teachers’ notions of “participation” with concepts of accessibility and universal design.

Outside of the University

When not in the classroom, my office, or the library, I can be found knitting, cooking vegetarian food, enjoying Ames’s lovely parks, exploring Iowa by biking and walking, and taking in the local live music scene.